Temporal automatic edge detection of echocardiographic images

A fully automatic algorithm that extracts left ventricular epicardial and endocardial borders from 2-D echocardiograms is presented. The algorithm starts with the end systole and end diastole contours obtained through a radial analysis of the image. After some iterative approximations, excellent quality contours for static images are found. At this point, in order to take advantage of the information contained in the temporal domain, the technique is applied to the whole cardiac cycle, thus obtaining a complete series of cardiac contours that are used in a further stage to find the left ventricular chamber volume and some other related parameters. The algorithm has been applied to different cardiac views, such as a parasternal short axis, apical and mitral, with the same degree of success